As if the title has ever just referred to a character. It’s been a brand name almost since the beginning. But still. Alex has been the heart of the strip for at least five years, since she went off to college. (She’s in grad school now.) And she started moving front and center well before that. Mike Doonesbury was never the star of Doonesbury. He was the centering character more than the central one and the strip was never about him. The same has been true for Alex since she's been taking over. The strip isn't about her.

Doonesbury is about the way we live now. All the main characters have been our guides into whatever neighborhoods of the zeitgeist Trudeau has decided to explore. This is why it hasn't mattered when any or all of them have disappeared for extended periods of time. This is why it hasn't mattered that none of the main characters from the early days, with one exception, has featured prominently in a major story arc in many, many years

The exception being B.D.

It's been interesting and amusing to me that B.D is essentially the hero of the strip and that for a while he and Boopsie were its only true grown-ups, considering what they were when Trudeau got started and what he put them through in the 80s and early 90s, and I'm sure I'm not the only fan who doesn't miss Hunk-Ra. But that all changed, they changed, when B.D. took the coaching job at Walden and the two of them became the only two of the main characters responsible for taking care of the next generation. Trudeau has never used his characters' parenthood to explore that theme. Over at the Redfern-Caucus house, the story has been adolescent (and arrested adolescent) rebellion and father-son rivalry. Meanwhile, at Mike and Kim's, Alex has been in a sweet and safe way out of their control from the start and in many ways and definitely in her own mind she's been taking care of Mike. And of course next to her mother J.J. she's always been the adult. But as a coach and then especially as a platoon leader in Iraq B.D.'s job has been to teach and protect the children.

Now, however, with Melissa and Toggle stepping forward, and with Sam getting ready to, that job is just about done.

None of this has seemed a major turn of events.

This passing of the torch isn't just something he's been working towards. It's something he had to do. It's the natural progression of the story he began to tell in the mid 1980s when the strip returned from hiatus and Trudeau put into effect the decision he'd made while on break to have his characters start aging in something close to real time.

If he'd gone the Funky Winkerbean route and picked up his characters at the points in their lives where they ought to have been in 1985 if they'd started college in 1970, we'd have met them again in their mid-thirties. Instead, Trudeau ratcheted everybody's age down. They were no longer his contemporaries. They were now nebulously twenty-something. They were my age.

At least, since Trudeau could never quite give up their histories, they were at the same stage in life as I was, as the blonde was, as our friends and brothers and sisters were, just out of school and starting careers and in Mike and J.J.'s case getting married and starting families.

Our lives and the Doonesbury characters' lives had begun to track.

And they're still tracking.

We've reached that stage together.

Our children have become the main characters in the stories of our lives.

Or, to see it as they see it, as Alex sees it, it’s their story now.

I see it happening in the blossoming of my niece Violet, who reminds me of a more solidly put together Alex---and ask her father if he doesn't often feel like Mike---not least because like Alex she's currently a student in Boston. I see it in the lives of my other brothers and sisters as their children are moving all together into young adulthood. I see it in my old friend Gary who played Mike in a Doonesbury revue I put together back in college and who became a grandfather over the winter. I see it in my own life now that Young Ken Mannion has starred college and Oliver is devoting much of his time and energy to developing his future career as a teacher. But I've felt it coming for a good long while.

Possibly because I was watching it happen in Doonesbury.

Like I said, I'm not surprised it's happened. I'm just a little surprised Trudeau feels the need to make a big deal out of it. And, also like I said, I wonder why now.

Maybe it struck him as the right way to follow up on Alex and Toggle's wedding before moving on with having them move on with their lives.

But then, why not now? It's a change worth acknowledging. It's a change that needs to be acknowledged. And I'm not talking about what's going on in the comic strip. We're not done. But we have to face it. The story of our lives is no longer the story of our life.

Ad revenue is still down, expenses are still up, and my faithful netbook needs to get fixed, so...if you enjoy what goes on around here and and you'd like to help keep this blog running strong and you can swing it, please consider making a donation. (You don't need a PayPal account.) It'd be a real help. Thank you. And thanks to one and all for reading the blog.

The people of a democratic New York come to Peter Parker’s rescue in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, a scene that has no parallel in the (arguably) aristocratic Gotham City of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises or either of his first two Batman movies.

With this post at Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell has me half-convinced that there is a political idea at work in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s not a conservative idea or a liberal idea, he argues. It’s an aristocratic one. Farrell’s noticed something about Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies that I missed. The regular citizens of Gotham City don’t seem to matter, not to Batman, not to any of the other characters, not even to themselves. They’re just part of crowds watching various elites, economic, political, and criminal, fight it out for the power to run their city. This makes Nolan’s Batman movies very different from the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and Sam Raimi’s and Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man films and from The Avengers.

In those movies, Superman, Spidey, and the Avengers are the protectors of the people of Metropolis and New York City not of the political, corporate, or economic entities called Metropolis and New York. And all along the way individual citizens pop up as characters in themselves. In Raimi’s Spider-Movies they don’t just show up to comment or be rescued. They take part in the battles Spidey fights on their behalf. They even come to Spider-Man’s rescue. (This happens in The Amazing Spider-Man,too, but the scene with the cranes swinging into place is not as moving or as emphatic as the scenes on the bridge in the first Spider-Man and on the train in Spider-Man 2. And it is literally mechanical.) The only regular citizen of Gotham I can recall in Batman Begins who makes himself felt as a character---I don’t remember any from The Dark Knight---is the homeless guy Bruce gives his overcoat to before he sets off to wander the world in search of his destiny. And that’s not symbolic of Bruce becoming one with the people in any ennobling and democratic sense. It’s him literally giving up his identity. To be one with the people is to be anonymous.

As a contrast, think about BruceCampbell’scameos in the three Spider-Man movies or the guy in the elevator in Spider-Man 2. These are characters who exist apart from their relationship to the hero, who have personal lives outside the plot. And they are representative of the people of New York City.

In The Dark Knight Rises the people are represented by John Blake, who is a cop, which makes him the People’s Tribune and so not really one of them and not a democratic character.

In the Spider-Man movies, the ones starring Maguire and (particularly) the new one with Andrew Garfield, the cops are clearly not representative of the people, at least not in their relationship to Spider-Man.

So I can see Farrell’s point. Nolan does tend to present the people of Gotham as a crowd to be controlled and, implicitly, a mob in the making if they aren’t controlled. But like I said, I’m only half-convinced that The Dark Knight Rises is meant to convey any explicitly political message. Nolan’s neglect of the common folk may tell us something about his personal politics or prejudices. But it seems to me more a result of his artistic ambitions.

Nolan makes movies in order to design and play elaborate games. His characters are pieces in those games. I don’t think he’s uninterested in his characters as characters. They’re not like Professor Plum and Miss Scarlett (except when they are), stereotypes on which the audience, playing along at home, can project whatever personalities we want. But I think Nolan’s way of exploring character is to put people into his game and move them around as if they were the top hat or the race car and see how they react. There just isn’t room on the game board or enough playing time (or money in the budget) for anything or anybody that isn’t part of the game except as background or obstacle.

Think of Inception. Nobody’s dreams include any random characters showing up to no plot-related purpose. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character always dreams of his wife and children, never of his tenth grade geometry teacher or kids from a McDonald’s commercial. Of course, all the dreams are being manipulated, but that’s the point. It’s the movie slyly commenting on itself. Nolan’s movies are like his characters’ manipulated dreams.

Politics of one kind or another, Nolan’s own or whatever the audience chooses to read into it, may seep into The Dark Knight Rises but if so, they are rather incoherently addressed. In fact, they are incompetently expressed.

And I just don’t think of Christopher Nolan as an incompetent filmmaker.

Editor’s note to readers who aren’t fanboys or fangirls: Under pressure from us, the author has promised to start writing about subjects other than superheroes again soon.

LOCH SHELDRAKE — You know how to get to Carnegie Hall, right? “Practice, practice, practice” goes the old joke.

But if you want to get to Broadway or Hollywood, you can do what Natalie Portman, Jon Cryer, Robert Downey Jr., Jennifer Jason Leigh, Josh Charles and scores of other showbiz folks have done for the past few decades. You turn left on Karmel Road off Route 52 in Sullivan County's Loch Sheldrake and head to Stagedoor Manor, the premier performing arts camp.

“Exactly,” says Charles, who stars in TV's “The Good Wife” and notes that one of his Stagedoor camp-mates – and friends – is Shawn Levy, who directed films like “Date Night,” “Night at the Museum and “The Pink Panther.

<snip>

Stagedoor Manor is where thousands of kids have learned everything from set design and stage combat to advanced acting and playwriting during a daily schedule that begins at 8 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m.

So many Stagedoor campers have made it in show business – Zach Braff, Mary Stuart Masterson and Amy Ryan are a few more – alumni joke about the “secret Stagedoor handshake” that opens the door to jobs in film or theater.

John McCain voted to convict Bill Clinton on both counts of the impeachment.

I know some of you still think Clinton should have been run out of town on a rail for being smarter, more successful, better looking, and more attractive to young women in red berets than you were, but still note. Five Republican senators voted against their leadership in what most Americans rightly saw as a Republican attempt at a bloodless coup intended to make Newt Gingrich President---they were going to go after Al Gore next. Cf. Helms, Jesse; China---and John McCain was not among those rebels.

John McCain is not and never has been a rebel or, as you used to love to flatter him, a maverick.

He is a vain, spiteful, ill-tempered, and mean little man who for a short time in the early days of the Clinton Administration, was willing to do a few things that the Republican Party leadership would have rathered he didn’t. But that stopped when he decided he wanted to run for President in 2000. His reputation for mavericky-ness and rebel-hood is mostly based on his willingness to say nasty things about other Republicans to reporters off the record.

McCain’s reputation for outsidery-ness was based on your desperate need to feel insidery.

John McCain is now and has always been a very rightward-leaning Republican. What he has never been is a leader among his fellow Republicans and that has often caused him to throw public tantrums and spew spite in private, but it has never led to him mustering any real challenge to the Party leadership.

Over the course of his career in the Senate, he has had multiple opportunities to demonstrate both leadership and independence. One was in 2000, after George W. Bush and Karl Rove pulled the nomination out from under his feet and many people, inside the party and out, recognizing the Bush Leaguers for what they were, urged him to run as an independent. That would have been a tall order, and the likely result would have been President Al Gore with no one ever having to hear the words “hanging chads”. The point is, though, that McCain did not channel his inner Theodore Roosevelt. In the end, he remained a loyal Republican.

Not only did he refuse to challenge Bush again, after Bush was installed as President McCain literally embraced him. He became a Bush Administration cheerleader on everything except torture and while his stand against that was principled it was not particularly forceful and definitely not effective. And it didn’t lead to him breaking ranks with the Party leadership in any substantial way, because…he wanted to run for President again, as a Republican.

As a Right Wing Republican.

Another opportunity to rebel came in 2009. He could have put the bitterness of his defeat behind him and become the champion of the bipartisanship the new President naively sought and the nation needed.

Instead, the President and the Democrats had to beg for votes from the likes of Olympia Snowe and Scott Brown, neither of whom was ever really in the position to profitably challenge the Republican Right that McCain was. And they still came through a couple of times.

And in 2010, when he ran for re-election to the Senate, he did not run as a rebel or a maverick. He ran as a Right Wing Republican promising to be an even more Right Wing Republican than his Right Wing Republican primary challenger.

Arizona was in the process of going crazy and John McCain went before the voters and promised, “Vote for me and I will represent your craziness for six more years!”

He actually hasn’t. Not always. But as the New York Times makes clear, while occasionally calling out the Tea Party wing of the House Republicans for their destructiveness and lunacy, he has still been steadfastly loyal to the Senate Republican leadership.

The Times’ article might be a case of too little too late and just an opportunity for partisan Democrats like me to write blog posts like I’m writing here right now, saying, “We told you so!” But, also from a partisan point of view, there is some practical good. To win in November, Mitt Romney needs the votes of the Republican Right and Independents, and to get the latter he needs to convince Independents that his pandering to the Right is all cynical show. Once he’s President he will---We swear!---revert to his true moderate self. John McCain or at any rate the image of John McCain as a maverick is useful for signaling that message. I hope some Independents will read the Times article and realize that Mitt’s having John McCain as one of his surrogates is pretty much the same as having any other Republican as a surrogate. If elected, Mitt will be the nominal leader of his party and at the moment his party is run by the Radical Right. John McCain is a loyal member of that party and no rebel and no supporter of rebels.

My main point here, however, you folks in the National Press Corps, is that John McCain’s reputation as a rebel, even a once-upon-a-time rebel, is entirely your creation.

You never covered John McCain the Republican politician. You covered the image of John McCain, maverick. And that’s indicative of your coverage of the Republican Party in general for twenty years. You’ve covered an image of your creation. You’ve ignored what the Republicans have been saying and doing and reported on them as if the GOP was still the party of Dwight Eisenhower and George Romney, of Howard Baker and George Herbert Walker Bush.

You covered John McCain as if he’s been a rebel all these years without noting what he was supposedly rebelling against.

A radical Right Wing party in the thrall of know-nothings, lunatics, religious maniacs, and racists.

And the real John McCain has been walking that party’s line for years.

The politics in The Dark Knight Rises are like the physics and the medical science, there to give the audience something to hang their suspended disbelief on at moments when they’re tempted to say This is ridiculous and walk out.

You didn’t know there were politics in The Dark Knight Rises? That means you only saw the movie and haven’t spent as much time as I have in the political precincts of the Blog City and Twitterville. In those neighborhoods there’s been a lot of parsing of the movie as if it was a political allegory or even a straightforward manifesto.

Conservatives think it’s a conservative movie. But then conservatives think everything they enjoy must somehow flatter their politics. To them there’s such thing as a conservative milkshake. They also think they own all the virtues, so a movie that seems to champion law and order over criminality and chaos is conservative because, you know, liberals are all for society tearing itself to pieces, except when they’re all for totalitarianism and forced shopping for broccoli at Whole Foods.

Liberals are divided. Some think it’s a conservative movie because it seems to treat extreme violence as the solution to all problems. Some think it’s a liberal movie with conservative leanings. Some think it’s out and out fascist. I’m not sure why and I don’t care, but probably because it has a strong man hero who swoops in and saves the day while the mob cowers behind him, which isn’t exactly what happens. I think the “It’s fascist” crowd are reading too much into it, overly influenced by Frank Miller’s Dark Knight graphic novels.

All I’m saying is that if there is anything resembling a realistically applicable political idea in the movie, I missed it. Like I said, the politics is like the physics and the medical science. You might as well try to build a fusion reactor or fix a broken back based on how those things work in the movie.

I’m not a fond of any critical reaction to a work of art that leaves out discussing the art. Everything that gets called politics in The Dark Knight Rises looks to me like plotting. The “politics” is there to set up situations necessary to telling the story. The movie needs:

A Gotham City that Bruce Wayne can mistake for a place that no longer needs the Batman but which we know really does, now more than ever.

A way for the bad guys to take control of Wayne Enterprises and get their hands on a nuclear bomb.

A Gotham City in even more trouble than it was in the beginning.

If you want to argue the politics of the movie, you need to do it while arguing that those three plot points work because the politics work. Me, I think the politics “work” only as sleight of hand.

The answer to the old and supposedly rhetorical question about what bears do in the woods turns out to be, “Not always.”

Following their first bear invasion that Friday, the Knowles family locked the windows and doors and left home for a dinner gathering.

They returned a few hours later to find a kitchen casement window had been torn open, its lock twisted into uselessness. Their home had been trashed all over again.

The family cleaned up their home and went to bed, hoping they'd have no move visits from bears.

But the next day was the worst. Knowles and his family returned home at 7 p.m. to find the house completely ransacked. The bears had trashed 7-year-old Takemi's bedroom, rummaging through his closet, even defecating on his bed.

Note the bed got it on the bears’ third visit.

And it was bears, plural. The photo by Jeff Goulding of the Times Herald-Record shows a cell phone image of the cage in which the Department of Environmental Conservation trapped a bear cub and the anxious and presumably angry mother bear outside. Read Jeremiah Horrigon’s story, Bears bash family’s house, in the Times Herald-Record to find out what happened to the mother and her cub. Registration not required but recommended for regular readers of this blog.

By the way, the Knowles family lives in a hamlet about an hour north of here called…Bearsville.

Attacked a neglected and overgrown section of the hedges in the backyard with the clippers late yesterday afternoon before supper and, pulling away some broad-leafed vines from an evergreen shrub, I uncovered this:

My heart sank.

Great, I thought, feeling I’d killed them just as surely as Charlie Brown felt he’d killed the Christmas tree, They’re doomed. I figured they were doomed in one of two ways. Either their mother would resent and be scared off by the human interference with her nest and the nestlings wouldn’t get fed anymore or tomorrow, with their shade gone, the sun would fry them.

Actually, there was a third possibility. I’d exposed them to predators. There are hawks in the neighborhood.

I was done with the trimming for the evening. I retreated inside and then set up a watch on the nest from the bedroom window, hoping to see that I was wrong about frightening away the mother.

And I was. Round about seven she swooped home. The babies’ heads shot upward, their necks craning to what I thought impossible lengths, spiky ruffs of new feathers sticking out up and down, their maws opened wide enough to swallow their mother whole.

She flew in and out three times while I was watching. Each time, she lingered a bit after feeding the babies, eyeing things, probably wondering who’d taken her roof. She didn’t look frightened. She looked miffed. But robins always look miffed. Cornell’s All About Birds website describes them as “industrious and authoritarian.” I think of them as little Puritans. Yes, they seem busy and hard-working, but they appear judgmental about it, as if they’re noticing that other birds aren’t working as hard or are having too much fun going about their business and thinking Sinners in the talons of an angry God thoughts. They’re convinced that their diligence is earning them their proper place in heaven but it gives them little and only grim satisfaction.

My field guide says robins are very protective of their nests and will gang up on crows if any wander into a neighborhood where several robin families have set up housekeeping. I don’t know what the mother would have done if she’d been around when I was hacking away at her home---or the father. That could have been a male I watched feeding the babies. Males help feed the young, although they don’t do any of the brooding. Probably just given me a stern, Puritanical judging and left me to work things out with my conscience.

At any rate, I’ll check on them tonight to see if they made it through the day safe from the sun or hawks. They look pretty well-grown, maybe they’ll fledge soon and leave the nest. I just looked out to see how things are. The mother was settled on the nest. She sensed me at the window though and flew off.

But only across the yard where she perched on a fence post, looking miffed.

Couple summers ago, I set myself the task of recovering my memories of the 1970s.

It wasn't that I'd forgotten. I wasn't suffering from a case of decade specific amnesia, my polyester-traumatized mind refusing to re-experience a world defined by hot combs, Earth Shoes, and shag carpeting. It was more a matter of imaginative blindness. I couldn't see my life as I lived it at the time.

I couldn’t see my life because I kept seeing Shaun Cassidy's.

This is still a problem.

I can see the 60s through my then self's eyes. Same with the 80's and the two decades since. But when I try to see the 70's I end up watching television.

I see the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and not myself and my family in our living room watching The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.

I don't see the 70s as I saw them. I see them as other people saw them through various lenses.

I think I watched too much television with too close attention. Too much Bob Newhart, too much Mary Tyler Moore. Too much Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. As a result, when I try to see people I knew in the 70s as they were then I see too much Marcia Brady in knee socks. Too much Laurie Partridge in pant suits. Too much Shirley Partridge in pants suits. Too much Mary Richards and Emily Hartley in pants suits.

You getting the idea I wasn’t a fan of pants suits? Pants suits and leisure suits were actually like Venom in Spider-man, creatures from outer space that wore the human beings who thought they were wearing them and used their hosts to advance their own evil purposes.

I may have a mental block. It may be that don't want to see what I was seeing because I would see myself embarrassing myself. I did a lot of that back then.

But it was when I began to spend a lot of time in the intimate company of pretty young women and I would like to be able to see them again.

This was bothering me so much for a while that I came up with a plan to fix it. I would fight media with media. I would watch a bunch of movies from the time on the theory that seeing people living through those days would reignite my own memories of living through them. In the movies the 70s were less obvious. Movies were also real-er.

I figured, though, that this wouldn't work with the better movies or any of my favorites because they are indelible in a different way. They insist on being seen and remembered for themselves. Manhattan and Annie Hall, Network, Three Days of the Condor, Coming Home, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, Shampoo, Dirty Harry, the taking of Pelham one two three, An Unmarried Woman, the Seduction of Joe Tynan, to name a few, are all very much reflective of their time---they look like what the 70s probably looked like. But they look even more like themselves.

But it might work, I thought, with movies that didn't already mean much to me, lesser known films and bad films and films my parents thought would be bad for me, movies I didn't remember for their own sakes because I didn't see them. So...Gator. Night Moves. Getting Straight. The New Centurions...one after another, I tried.

And it did work, to a degree. I got glimpses. Short but vivid scenes. Maybe I'd have gotten more if I'd kept at it.

I gave it up. It stopped feeling necessary. Most everything worth remembering from the 70s was still part of my life in the 80s. Friends and family I want to see from back then I can see as they were only a few years later.

Every now and then I'll still try. It usually happens when a memory bobs up on its own and I try to hold it on the surface for a really good look.

But it's just nearly impossible to wipe out the overlay of media. Just when I've got a bit of the window scraped clean, somebody comes along and slaps something like this over the glass.

This comes by way of Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns and Money, for whom I believe the 70s are only of historical interest. He’s a punk kid. I don’t think he’s even forty. I doubt he has any real polyester nightmares of the time. His media version of the decade was given to him by Sesame Street. His idea of the fashions of the times is probably Underoos, and isn’t this the weirdest ad ever?

The first half hour of The Dark Knight Rises is a great Catwoman movie and I hope Christopher Nolan shot another hour or so of footage that he can cut together with what’s here and release to theaters or at least put on the DVD.

Julie Newmar will always be the real Catwoman to me but Anne Hathaway…meow!

Not much to it. Basically it’s an announcement from the filmmakers that they are in fact working on a Superman movie and here’s some random footage to prove it. All it tells us about that movie is that, apparently, there’s a sequence in which Clark wanders the world, putting off the decision to become Superman, a decision Tom Welling’s Clark Kent avoided for several seasons on Smallville, so no news there.

It looks to me, though, that these shots of Clark on the bum are are meant to evoke the scenes of Bruce Wayne wandering the world trying to figure out his destiny in Batman Begins. Henry Cavill with his beard and matted dark hair even resembles Christian Bale with his beard and matted hair. That makes a connection between Man of Steel and the Dark Knight trilogy even though there is no connection. Man of Steel takes place in a different DC universe, one, DC, Warner Brothers, and fans are praying includes Wonder Woman, Flash, a thoroughly rebooted Batman not played by Christian Bale, and the rest of the Justice League.

What got to me, though, was the awfulness of the voice over. The Kevin Costner version played before the showing of The Dark Knight Rises we were at. There’s a version with Russell Crowe as Jor-El speaking. Costner plays Jonathan Kent and I hope what’s in the trailer isn’t indicative of either his performance or the dialog in general. It’s terrible writing and as advice to Clark it’s empty and worthless and a a result heartless. Doesn’t come close to this exchange between Clark and Jonathan in the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie. I can’t find a clip so you’ll just have to imagine the perfect modesty of Glenn Ford’s delivery:

Jonathan Kent: Been showing off a bit, haven't you, son? Young Clark Kent: [going over to Jonathan] Um... I didn't mean to show off, Pop. It's just that, guys like that Brad, I just want to tear him apart. Jonathan Kent: Yeah, I know, I know. Young Clark Kent: And I know I shouldn't... Jonathan Kent: Yeah, I know, you can do all these amazing things and sometimes you feel like you will just go bust unless you can tell people about them. Young Clark Kent: Yeah. I mean every time I kick the football I can make a touchdown. Every time! I mean, is it showing off if somebody's doing the things he's capable of doing? Is a bird showing off when it flies? Jonathan Kent: No, no. Now, you listen to me. When you first came to us, we thought people would come and take you away because, when they found out, you know, the things you could do... and that worried us a lot. But then a man gets older, and he starts thinking differently and things get very clear. And one thing I do know, son, and that is you are here for a reason. I don't know whose reason, or whatever the reason is... Maybe it's because... uh... I don't know. But I do know one thing. It's *not* to score touchdowns.

Roberto Benigni as Leopoldo Pisanello, an ordinary clerk who suddenly, inexplicably, and absurdly finds he’s become the most interesting man in Italy, desperately running from his unwanted celebrity in one of the four---or is it five?---short stories that make up Woody Allen’s latest, To Rome With Love.

Part of the pain came from how it drew psychic blood. Does every young intellectual, artistically inclined young male grad student go through a summer during which while he's seemingly happily living with the good-hearted blonde he's planning to marry, whom he knows he should marry, have his head turned by a beautiful but neurotic, intellectually pretentious, self-infatuated, yet sexy as all get out brunette artiste and despite himself (literally in the movie) set out to destroy his own future happiness?

Or did Woody crib directly from my life?

Ok. I wasn't living in Rome and the ghost of my future self didn’t show up to warn me I was heading for big trouble. But the basics of the story were so familiar that I cringed every time the scene shifted back to this threesome.

That was part of it.

Another part of it was the familiarity. I don't mean in its being familiar to that summer in my life. I mean in its being an old, old story. I was living out a cliche and To Rome With Love retells the same one without adding much more to it than I did except Alec Baldwin, which is something, but still.

To Rome With Love is four separate short films-- five, depending on whether you see one of them as actually two that share characters---that interrupt each other and fight for the audience's attention and affection.

Besides the triangle, there’s:

Roberto Benigni as an ordinary cubicle worker and family man who suddenly and inexplicably finds himself declared the most interesting man in Italy, an instant celebrity besieged by journalists, paparazzi, and obsessed fans following his every move and demanding to know every little thing about him---what he had for breakfast, the instructions he gave his barber, his choice in underwear.

Alessandro Tiberi and and Alessandra Mastronardi as Antonio and Milly, a pair of newlywed country mice come to Rome for their honeymoon with the added purpose of meeting and impressing Antonio’s snobby relatives, their plans going awry when Milly gets lost in the streets of the unfamiliar city while looking for a place to get her hair done and Antonio’s relatives show up at their hotel room while Antonio is in bed with a prostitute, played by Penelope Cruz, whom he impulsively introduces to his aunts and uncles as Milly. This is the one that may be two: Milly’s adventures in which she comes under the lustful eye of one of her favorite movie stars and Antonio’s desperate attempts to pass off the pro as his innocent new bride.

And Woody Allen, returning to act in one of his own films for the first time since Scoop, looking a little frail and uncertain but still deft at timing the delivery of his quintessential one-liners, as an unhappily and, we suspect, not voluntarily retired opera director who discovers that his daughter’s prospective father-in-law is, at least in voice, the reincarnation of Enrico Caruso and Allen’s ticket back into the opera business, if only the man didn’t have one little problem---he can only sing in the shower.

None of these shorts, although lively and funny, are inspired or fall on the floor hilarious, but the triangle story is the least funny and most pedestrian in direction. More painful than that, however, is that it's the one that most likely will remind you of Allen at his post-farcical best, echoing Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. It had me thinking wistfully, What talent he's cast here! If only he could have worked the same magic for them that he worked for himself and Diane Keaton way back when.

That's unfair. And it diminishes the magic he did work and the magic Page and Eisenberg worked for him. The main reason this part of To Rome With Love is so painful to watch is their convincing and almost too honest performances.

As Jack, an aspiring architect in love with love a sweet-natured grad student (Gerwig) but irresistibly drawn to her supposed best friend, Eisenberg does a fine job of showing how a decent and basically moral guy consciously and stubbornly pursues a desire he knows is not only self-destructive but wrong. He makes Jack Allen’s best explanation so far of “the heart wants what it wants.”

As Monica, an out of work actress keeping her skills sharp by acting the part of herself or the more interesting self she believes she should be, Page draws a devastating caricature of a type she's probably all too familiar with and somewhere there's a former drama school classmate or cast mate screaming bloody murder in embarrassed outrage and another unselfaware young actress taking notes. Her character is the reason never to date actresses and the explanation for why they're irresistible. From the second she appears on screen Page might as well be wearing a sign that says Run! Run for Your Life and Don't Look Back! There'd be fine print below, however: Secondary Warning. Warning you I'm no good for you is one of my best tricks for capturing your attention. And in even finer print below that. Tertiary Warning. My seeming honesty in warning you of my tricks is another one of my tricks. Monica expects you to understand it's all a performance and to admire and applaud her for it even as she's breaking your heart and ruining your life.

As I said, this is all very painful, in three separate ways. But it’s also fun.

And that answers questions that invariably get asked every time Allen releases a new movie and fans, who know better, walk out of the theater once again disappointed that this one too doesn't measure up to Woody's best. What was the point? Why did he bother? Why does he bother? Why do we bother?

Because it can still be fun.

No matter how weak or disappointing any of these late-inning Allen movie might be, there’s always some fun to be had watching his ensembles of excellent actors given interesting characters to play, intelligent lines to say, and great jokes to deliver. Well, except for Hollywood Ending and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.

It’s fun, despite the pain, to watch Page work her femme fatale as little intellectual girl lost act on Eisenberg. It's fun to watch Alec Baldwin toning it down from 30 Rock (and his real life) and giving us a glimpse of the aging romantic lead he might have become if he hadn't discovered he was funny.

It's fun to see Benigni reined in by a disciplined and disciplining director who knows how to direct slapstick.

It's fun watching Penelope Cruz wear the shortest, tightest, most cleavage revealing little red dress in movie history with the same dash, nerve, and casual authority as Christopher Reeve wore the cape, Harrison Ford wore the fedora, and Vivian Leigh wore the drapes. It's fun watching Mastronardi out-adorable Cruz. It's fun watching bald, big-gutted, forty-seven years old and not looking a day over fifty Antonio Albanese, strut and smolder as the absolutely convinced of his own reputation as the sexiest man in Italian cinema sexiest man in Italian cinema.

It's fun to watch Judy Davis, period, even though she isn't given enough to do.

It's not great fun, and it's not always fun. But there's enough fun for a pleasant night out at the movies. Enough for me, at any rate.

If Midnight in Paris was the beginning of a trend back to the good old days---with the ironic theme that the good old days are never as good as the even better even older days---then To Rome With Love continues the trend at least in being infused with a more antic and good-natured comic spirit than the movies Allen made between 2001 (Curse of the Jade Scorpion) and 2010 (Tall Dark Stranger).

It’s not as good as Midnight in Paris, however good Midnight in Paris actually was. By design it’s not as coherent. There are no central and centering characters whose plights and troubles actually matter to us. There are no supporting characters who anchor To Rome With Love the way Kathy Bates’ Gertrude Stein and Corey Stoll’s Ernest Hemingway held down Midnight in Paris. There are no moments as transplendent as Adrian Brody declaring himself "Dali!"

But it has its own moments, although most of them seem to involve Benigni. I can’t decide if my favorite is the one in which he’s ambushed while he’s shaving by yet another journalist or when he discovers too late that he likes being a celebrity.

There's another difference between the two movies that's neither good nor bad, just indicative.

Allen didn't make To Rome With Love as any kind of sequel to Midnight in Paris and it's not the valentine to Rome that the latter was to Paris. In Midnight in Paris, the city was essential to the characters’ existence, and not just because Owen Wilson kept telling us so. In To Rome With Love, Rome is a comedic backdrop. It's a shorthand explanation for why the characters are all so volatile and nuts.

Appropriately, there are fewer of the sort of post card moments that got a little cloying in Midnight in Paris. There are some, however, and the one at the end is ravishing.

My brainy and talented film major niece, Violet Mannion, is part of the production crew for Northern Borders, an independent film starring Bruce Dern that’s going into post-production provided their Kickstarter campaign brings in the bucks they need. And they’re doing pretty well. Only three hundred dollars or so short of their goal as of seven this morning. They’ve got until Monday to raise the rest. So if you wanna be in pictures, at least as an angel, and help out a bunch of young and eager filmmakers on the rise, please consider kicking in a buck or two. Here’s their pitch:

The Three Stooges is out on DVD and available for streaming. When it was in the theaters, I had to go see it alone and it's been vetoed for Family Movie Night. I'm not naming names, but there's a certain female in the house...Anywho, I liked it. Here's my review from April:

“Nyah-ah-ahhh!!!” Larry, Moe, and Curly (Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos, and Will Sasso) react to their latest disaster in the Farrelly Brothers’ The Three Stooges.

Yeah, I went. What’s it to ya?

Have to admit I didn’t feel right about it. Sitting there in the theater, waiting for it to start, I was feeling uneasy and a little guilty.

I was sure that as soon as the lights went out my mother would come charging into the multiplex, dash up to the projection booth, and turn off the projector.

Mom Mannion hates the Stooges. Always has.

When I was a kid one of the local TV stations used to broadcast an hour of Stooges shorts and Popeye cartoons every weekday morning starting at six. And every morning at five thirty I’d be up, make myself a bowl of cereal, take it into the living room and settle down to watch the end of Sunrise Semester and then the Stooges. I loved the Stooges. But I was careful not to laugh. And I kept the sound way down. Because I knew.

If so much as a nyuk or a woob or an Oh, a wiseguy made its way upstairs, Mom Mannion would snap awake and come flying downstairs to turn of the TV.

Like I said, Mom Mannion hated the Stooges. Everybody’s mother did.

So please don’t tell her I went to the movie.

Which I enjoyed, if you want to know. And I’m guessing you do, cause why else are you reading this? I had a blast.

Ok. I’m not about to recommend it, exactly. I’m just telling you I enjoyed it. I can’t tell you if you will. You have to use your judgment. If you’ve never liked the Three Stooges you probably won’t like The Three Stooges. (You should ask yourself, though, if you really don’t like them or you just feel you shouldn’t like them.) If you loved the Stooges, that’s another question. You might feel too loyal to the real Stooges to give these boys a chance. You might feel like film critic Tony Dayoub who told me in a Twitter exchange a while back that he was hoping to give the movie a skip because he never liked when the third Stooge was anybody but Curly, so why would he want to watch three replacements?

The answer to that is Shemp (and I have a soft spot for Shemp), Joe Besser, and Curly Joe DeRita were not Curly while Will Sasso is. Just like Chris Diamantopoulos is Moe and Sean Hayes is Larry. Boy, is he ever Larry.

If at this point you’re moved to point out that the Stooges were never the comic geniuses the Marx Brothers were, save it. Next time I’m in McDonalds enjoying a Big Mac, stop by and you can tell me how much better the burgers are at Carl’s Jr.

The main and maybe the only reason to see the movie is the performances of the three leads, who are brilliant. What they do goes beyond dead-on impersonations. They don’t do Moe Howard, Jerry Howard, and Larry Fine doing Moe, Curly, and Larry. They play the characters the Howards and Fine created. I never felt reminded of the Stooges. I felt I was watching the Stooges.

The effect is helped by the Farrelly Brothers’ faithfulness to the spirit of the Stooges’ two-reelers.

To start with, there’s a plot.

The best of Stooges’ shorts told stories, slight ones but they told them solidly and as if the outcomes mattered. Something was at stake and often not for the Stooges themselves but for someone else whose cause they'd adopted. The plots weren't excuses for the boys to hit, slap, poke, and wallop each other. They didn't need excuses for that. They encountered problems they had to solve and the fun and the funny was in watching them try to solve them or fail to solve them.

In the movie, Mo, Larry, and Curly set out to raise money to save the orphanage where they grew up and somehow manage to enmesh themselves in the plot of Double Indemnity which leads them to invading a hospital, starting a salmon farm on a golf course, crashing a party at a mansion, and joining the cast of Jersey Shore.

Along the way there’s the expected amount of eye-poking, ear, nose, and hair-pulling, tongue-biting, head-knocking, belly-bumping, wall-thumping, heavy object dropping, pratfalling, and general mayhem creating.

Much as I loved the Stooges when I was a kid, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of their oeuvre and it’s been years since I've watched any of their shorts all the way through. But I'm pretty sure the Farrellys worked in at least nods to most of their best recurring gags, tropes, and routines, including a variation that nicely ups the ante on one of my favorites, Moe drawing a saw across Curly's skull, Curly's cry of pain “Oh oh oh oh” turning into a cheerfully surprised “Oh look”!, and the camera closing in to show that all the saw's teeth are bent.

And while the movie is set in the thoroughly undisguised present, the plot takes the boys into settings and situations that haven't much changed since the 1930s. A hospital nursery, a golf course, a zoo, a fancy party at a mansion. All places the original Stooges could bumble and stumble into to cause mischief without having to cope with any future shock.

I also liked how they found ways to get the boys into different costumes. Every short began with the Stooges in a new line of work. They were firemen, plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, farmers, big game hunters, ice men, cowboys, Union spies in the Civil War, private eyes, doctors.(“Calling Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard!”) There'd be no explanation for the career change or the time travel or their sudden acquisition of actual competency at whatever enterprise they were putting their hands to. But then every short was complete unto itself. It didn't matter that they were soldiers in this episode after having been college professors in the last one. But the movie is a single long story and the Stooges are who and what they start off as throughout, so the trick the Farrellys have to pull off is how to get them dressed like carpenters and farmers and doctors and TV stars and society swells while keeping them inside the plot. They pull it off.

One thing disappointed me. They don’t give Curly his due. Curly was often the hero of the Stooges shorts. The plots would center around him and it would be up to him to save the day. And in many of the shorts we got to see Curly on his own, dealing with supporting characters, and even all alone, working out a problem, his solutions causing more trouble than they saved, of course. Curly was the most gifted physical comedian of the three and he had the best timing. Moe knew this and made sure bits were built around his brother to showcase his talents as a mime and an ad-libber. Sasso is given a couple of brief moments to shine on his own, but the Farrellys really should have let him have at least one extended solo routine like the original Curly’s classic ice shaving scene in An Ache in Every Stake.

Knuckleheads.

But that’s just a way of saying again how perfectly Sasso---and Hayes and Diamantopoulos---recreate the originals. And, like I said, the three leads are really the reason to see the movie. Plus, it’s actually funny.

As for the supporting cast…it’s fun to see Jane Lynch playing it in a very non-Jane Lynch sort of way as a nun. Jennifer Hudson’s best moment comes near the end of the credits, so stick around. A little bit of Larry David as Sister Mary Mengele goes a long way and fortunately the Farrellys don’t let him take it too far beyond that. Craig Bierko takes his punishment well. Sofia Vergara wears her tight dresses in a way that makes you understand why men would want to kill for her. And Snooki and the rest of the cast of Jersey Shore do a good job parodying their self-parodies.

The real standouts are the three young actors who play the Stooges as ten year old kids, Lance Chantiles-Wertz as Larry, Robert Capron as Curly, and, especially Skyler Gisondo as Moe. And they get to deliver the Stooges’ signature musical Hello.

Now, one more thing that the Farrellys got right, and this brings me back to Mom Mannion.

They made the Stooges good guys.

Mom didn’t want us watching the Stooges because she was worried we would hurt ourselves imitating them. She didn’t think we were dumb enough to bop each other with hammers or rake saws across our skulls. But she did think we might try to pretend like they did and poke each other in the eye or bonk each other over the head or knock our knuckleheads together accidentally while “rehearsing.”

What I could never make her understand is that, well, yeah, I enjoyed the slapstick, but the reason I liked the Stooges was that I liked the Stooges.

They were good guys.

At least they were in my favorites. I didn’t like the ones in which they were just jerks or dopes.

In my favorites, they were well-meaning and good-hearted and they took the side of the weak and the downtrodden and the down on their luck and the nice and the decent and the honest against the rich and scheming and powerful and mean.

And they looked out for each other.

You might remember that Moe rarely called either Larry or Curly (or Shemp) by their real names. When he wasn’t calling them knuckleheads or other insults, he called them…

Kid.

Which is what a Depression era movie big brother would call the younger brothers he loves and worries about and who love him and worry about him back.

Like the originals, these Stooges love each other.

They just have a funny way of showing it.

The Three Stooges, directed by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Farrelly, written by the Farrellys and Mike Cerrone, starring Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes, Will Sasso, Larry David, Jennifer Hudson, and Jane Lynch. Now in available on DVD and to watch instantly at Amazon.

________________________

I mentioned how the Farrellys managed to work in nods to the original Stooges’ best recurring gags and classic routines. They missed one of my favorites though. “No, limboiger!”

Back in 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts could continue discriminating against gay people, Young Ken Mannion had just started Cub Scouts and I’d signed on as den leader. At the first pack meeting after the ruling, I proposed that our pack defy the Boy Scouts and welcome anyone with a son or male child they were guardian of who wanted to join. “We need all the help we can get,” I said. I’m not sure how many of the parents knew what I was talking about. I’m pretty sure at least one of the fathers who did wanted to tell me to take a hike without any scouts. But my proposal passed unanimously.

In the years we were part of that pack, it never became an issue. Few boys in the parish signed up. Few of the parents of the few who did volunteered to be leaders or even help out with the Blue and Gold dinners.

There were several reasons for this, but I think the main was that two of the mothers who were leaders of one of the dens got into a fistfight at one of the den meetings.

After we moved to this area, Ken and Oliver joined the Cub Scouts here. I continued an assistant den leader. But I didn’t raise the issue again. The fact is, I didn’t think to. In the years between, it sort of went away or at least it didn’t come back to my attention. I’m pretty sure one of the fathers who was a den leader here was gay and if anybody had made a fuss about it I’d have stood up for him but no one did. No one ever mentioned it.

When they finished with Cub Scouts, each having made it all the way through Weblos II, neither Ken nor Oliver want to move on to Boy Scouts. They had too much else on their plates by that point. And when they left Scouting, I left it too. And over the years the whole experience has moved farther and farther towards the back of my mind. I’ve hardly given it any thought. So I was startled yesterday when the news broke that the Scouts had reaffirmed their commitment to discrimination.

I think somewhere along the line I’d gotten it into my head that the Scouts had adopted their own form of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Actually, what startled me was the way I got the news, via a liberal mother’s angry declaration on Twitter that no good liberals should allow their sons to participate in Scouting.

My immediate reaction was They’re still at it? But right away I moved to challenging the mother. No, that’s the wrong way to go about this. That’s leaving the field to the bigots. The best way to challenge this and change things is from within. It’s easy enough for the Scouts to boot an individual scoutmaster or scout. It’s something else when they have to boot an entire troop.

The announcement suggests that hurdles may be high for a couple of members of the national executive board — Ernst & Young CEO James Turley and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson — who have recently indicated they would try to work from within to change the policy. Both of their companies have been commended by gay-rights groups for gay-friendly employment policies.

Stephenson is on track to become president of the Scouts' national board in 2014 and will likely face continued pressure from gay-rights groups.

Good for Turley and Stephenson! And good luck to them!

I like Scouting. I think it’s good for kids. It teaches liberal values like community service, environmental stewardship, and---despite itself---tolerance. It also rewards kids for real achievements that don’t have anything to do with how well they perform on a football field or a basketball court or in a classroom. Not every kid can score touchdowns at will or solve differential equations. But they can learn how to sew on a button, make pancakes, treat a burn, read a map, stand up for others, help a stranger, be kind.